The Sirena Quest (14 page)

Ray got the bolt-cutters into position and snapped through the lock. Lou twisted off the old lock and pulled back the latch. He tried to lift the lid.

“Give me a hand,” he said. “It's rusted shut.”

Gordie and Ray joined him.

“Ready?” Ray crouched alongside them. “One, two, three.”

They strained in silence for a few seconds and then, with a metallic screech, the top popped free. It groaned as they lifted it. Billy shined the flashlight inside. The four of them stared at a large object that was wrapped in gray burlap and tied with several loops of rope. It took up almost the entire container, one end wider than the other.

“Holy shit,” Gordie said. “You think it's her?”

Ray leaned into the container and wrapped his arms around the narrow end. He grimaced as he tried to lift it out. It didn't budge.

“Thing is heavy,” he said.

Finally, with two of them crouching on the lids of the adjacent containers and using loops of rope for added leverage as the other two worked from the front, they were able to winch the thing out of the container and set it down heavily on its side. Carefully, they tilted it up until it stood on its base. Ray used his pocketknife to slice through the two loops of rope nearest the top. He and Lou pulled the burlap wrapping away from the top portion and stepped back.

Billy clicked on the flashlight.

Gordie finally broke the silence. “Wow.”

They were staring at the top half of Sirena's head. It protruded from the burlap as far down as her nose. Illuminated by the flashlight, it was as if she were emerging, cold and stiff, from a tattered chrysalis. The beam of light reflected in her blank eyes.

Lou leaned back against the empty storage bin, arms crossed over his chest and shaking his head in wonder. He looked at Ray and smiled. “Wow is right.”

Ray nodded. “We need to get her the hell out of here. Fast and quiet.”

***

Almost thirty-five years ago, presumably in the wee hours of a night much like this one, Sirena made her stealthy ascent into the Wrigley Field scoreboard. And now, at 4:47 a.m. on the morning of June 11, 1994—after spending 12,771 days inside a locked metal container in that scoreboard—Sirena left through that same trapdoor, still in her burlap shroud.

Billy was the spotter at the foot of the ladder.

“Careful,” he called up softly.

Sirena swayed at the end of the nylon rope as she slowly descended. Gordie straddled the trapdoor opening and guided the ropes that Ray and Lou, standing behind him, were letting out hand over hand.

Billy reached up to steady the burlap-wrapped statute.

“Five more feet,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Four…three…two…slow…slow.”

She touched down with a gentle clunk. They tossed the rest of the ropes through the trapdoor and clambered down. Lou pulled the trapdoor shut.

“Get down,” Ray whispered, pointing toward a security guard in the grandstands near the bullpen in left field.

Fifteen long minutes passed as the security guard made his rounds and finally departed up the aisle behind home plate.

Ray tilted the statue back toward him. “Move it.”

No one spoke again until Lou had turned the van onto the southbound entrance to Lake Shore Drive at Irving Park. Sirena was stowed in back, still wrapped in burlap and now covered with a blanket.

“Holy shit,” Gordie said. “We did it.”

Lou turned to Ray. “Nice work, Captain.”

Ray grinned. “It only gets better.”

SCENE 47: THE HUTCHISON PRIZE - THE IDEA {Draft 3}:

CUT TO:

INT. DORM ROOM - NIGHT

Ray and Lou are in the outer room smoking a joint and listening to the Grateful Dead's “Uncle John's Band” on the stereo. Bronco is at his desk, headset on, underlining passages in his textbook with a yellow highlighter.

The door BURSTS OPEN. In steps a despondent Gordie Cohen.

RAY
(holding out the joint)

Hey, Gordo. Want a hit?

Gordie trudges past them into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

LOU

Shot down again.

RAY
(standing)

Gotta take a leak.

Ray leaves.

BILLY
(taking off his headset)

What's wrong with Gordie?

LOU

Met a girl at the bookstore today. Asked her to meet him at the student union tonight. Looks like she didn't show.

(holding out the joint)

You want some?

BILLY
(replacing his headset)

No, thanks.

Ray returns.

RAY

You ready for this? Reggie Pelham is standing in the shower stall. Guess what he's doing?

LOU

Jacking off?

RAY

Worse. Practicing his speech for that Hutchison competition. Something about the architectural works of Thomas Jefferson.

LOU

Carrying on the grand tradition.

RAY

What tradition?

LOU

They've been giving out the Hutchison Oratory Prize since the 1920s. Jerry told me more than half the winners prepped at Choate. That's why some folks call it the Choate Competition.

Gordie comes out of the bedroom, head shrouded in a towel, toothbrush in his hand. He leaves for the bathroom.

LOU

Gordie should enter that competition.

RAY

And do what? One of his comedy routines?

LOU

Exactly.

RAY

Huh?

LOU

He can do a comedy routine that looks like a speech. He's the funniest guy on campus. He won't win, but people will love it, especially chicks. Cheer him up.

RAY

You think he'd do it?

LOU

We'll make him do it.

Gordie returns from the bathroom, head still shrouded in the towel.

RAY

Gordo, we got a great idea for you.

Gordie trudges past and disappears into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him

LOU

I'll bring him around.

Lou goes over to the bedroom door and opens it. He peers in.

LOU

Gordie?

GORDIE
(off screen)

Leave me alone.

Lou looks back at Ray and winks. Then he steps inside the bedroom and gently closes the door behind him.

Chapter Twenty-seven

The highway curved southeast out of Chicago into Indiana, the dark waters of Lake Michigan intermittently visible off to the left. Their first goal was Ohio: get across the border, find a motel, catch some Z's. Then they'd figure out their next move.

They saw the sun rise over Gary, Indiana—or rather, Lou did. The rest were asleep—Ray slumped against the passenger door, snoring; Gordie and Billy in back.

As he drove through Indiana, alone with his thoughts, Lou marveled over what they had done. The four of them, the goofy James Gang. Search parties spread literally across the globe, here they were, cruising along I-80 with the legendary Sirena in the back of his minivan.

And, incredibly enough, as Gordie announced before he fell asleep, waiting for them at Barrett College was three million dollars—$750,000 for each of them.

“A recipe for happiness!” Gordie had declared.

To which Ray responded, “Don't be a douche bag, Cohen. Anyone who thinks a lot of money will make them happy has never had a lot of money.”

To which Gordie answered, “I'm happy to test that hypothesis.”

Lou, however, had been thinking about another possible use for that money. But he didn't dwell on it, reminding himself not to tempt the gods.

Cruising along the interstate as the sky began to lighten, Lou drove past a high school football field on his left. It was an older field with concrete stands that reminded him of his own high school football field. His thoughts drifted back to the summer of 1969, to that afternoon in late August during the last week of two-a-day practices. He'd been waiting for the huddle to form. As his teammates trotted back, he glanced toward the sidelines, where the cheerleaders—all wearing short shorts and gold-and-black U. City T-shirts—had just arrived and were now practicing.

“Push 'em back, Push 'em back, WAY BACK! Push 'em back, Push 'em back, WAY BACK!”

She was the third from the right, a pom-pom in each hand. She had dark curly hair, a deep tan, and long athletic legs.

“Who's that?” he'd asked Steve Becker, his fullback and best friend.

“Which one?”

“Curly hair, tan.”

Steve had straightened, squinted toward the sidelines, and leaned back into the huddle.

He removed his plastic mouth guard. “Andi Kaplan. A junior. Moved here from Baltimore last Spring.”

Lou called a play-action pass to the right and rolled out almost to the sidelines for a better look. He trotted back to the huddle alongside Steve.

“She's pretty.”

“Yeah, but I hear she's stuck-up.”

She wasn't, but it took Lou more than a month to find out—two weeks to get up the nerve to ask her out, and several more weeks of asking before she finally had a free Saturday. They went to the Brentwood Theater to see
Midnight Cowboy
and then to the Steak ‘n Shake on Olive Boulevard for cheeseburgers and Cokes. She was funny and smart and had lovely green eyes. She kissed him good night at her front door—a good kiss with a hint of musk. He'd wandered back to his car in love.

Gordie and Billy began stirring around eight o'clock. Lou pulled off the interstate just beyond Elkhart for breakfast at a Denny's. They made sure to get a table by the window with an unobstructed view of Lou's minivan, which he'd backed into a parking space alongside the restaurant.

Perhaps it was lack of sleep—he'd been up for more than twenty-four hours—but the whole Denny's ambiance felt surreal to Lou. There on the table before him was the bright plastic menu with its profusion of Slams—Grand Slam, Farmer's Slam, Lumberjack Slam, French Slam. And out there on that most ordinary of asphalt parking lots in the back of that most ordinary of minivans sat that most extraordinary of statues, still wrapped in the burlap that had swathed her for more than three decades. Staring through the plate-glass window at his van, his vision blurred by a wave of fatigue, he felt as if he'd been beamed into an alternative universe.

“We can reach Barrett by tomorrow night,” Gordie said. “How do we protect her once we get there?”

Ray looked up from the road map spread on the table in front of him. “We can try to make an arrangement with one of the local banks. See if they'll let us put her in their vault. If not, maybe rent a storage locker. We'll figure something out.”

He looked down at the map again. After a moment, he pointed at a dot along Highway 80.

“Let's shoot for Milan,” he said. “We can be there by lunch.”

It was a quarter to one when they pulled into a McDonald's near Milan. Ray had driven the last seventy miles with Gordie riding shotgun and Billy and Lou in back trying to sleep. They took a vote as they waited in line to place their orders, and agreed to press on after lunch. Their new goal: the Pennsylvania border.

Ray unfolded the roadmap at the table and studied it as he ate his sandwich.

Gordie held up his McRib sandwich. “You ever wonder if the people who come up with these names get their jollies from making adults sound like buffoons?”

Ray looked up from the map and frowned. “What the fuck are you talking about now?”

“What are you eating?” Gordie asked.

Ray glanced down at his sandwich and back at Gordie. “What's it look like? A Big Mac.”

Gordie grinned. “See?”

“See what?”

“The name, dude. You're an adult.”

“So?”

“Listen to it, Ray. Big Mac. It's ridiculous. Same with the others.” He gestured toward the menu posted on the wall behind the counter. “Egg McMuffin. Chicken McNuggets. And not just McDonald's. Don't forget Burger King.”

“The Whopper,” Bronco Billy said. “And the Whaler.”

“And America's favorite drink,” Gordie said. “The Big Gulp. That's democracy in action, boys. The great equalizer. You get in that drive-thru lane at Jack in the Box, wait for a voice inside the clown head to ask what you'd like, holler out an order for a ‘Jumbo Jack,' and by the time you pull up to the window you're just another grinning butthead.”

“Gordie,” Ray said, “how 'bout shutting your trap before I shove a Happy Meal up your McAsshole.”

***

About an hour into Pennsylvania, somewhere between Sharon and Clarion, they pulled off I-80 and got a room at the Thrifty Dutchman Motel. It was almost four in the afternoon.

They covered Sirena with the tarp, lugged her into the room, and set her on the carpet near the corner. There were two twin beds in the room. They took the mattresses off the boxsprings, set them on the carpet, and flipped for who got what. Gordie won a coin toss, flopped face down on his mattress, and uttered a lengthy groan of exhaustion.

“Wake me tomorrow,” he said.

“Hold on,” Lou said. “Before we crash here, let's take a look at her.”

Ray heaved himself up from his boxspring. “Yeah. Why not?”

“I can't move,” Gordie said, still face down.

Billy, Lou, and Ray unwrapped the burlap. It was a slow and messy process, with chunks of rotting material crumbling in their hands or tearing away. But eventually they removed it all.

Ray stepped back, crossed his arms over his chest, and gave her an appraising look. He bowed slightly. “Greetings, Your Highness.”

“This is neat,” Billy said.

Lou felt a mixture of elation and disappointment. The elation was obvious. To be face-to-face with Sirena—well, it was extraordinary. By the time of Lou's freshman year, she'd been gone for more than a decade, and as the years passed the world came to seem so vast a burying ground that her disappearance took on the permanence of death. But here she was. And here he was—one of the first four people to stand in her presence in thirty-five years.

But it was also disappointing, the letdown perhaps the result of seeing too many movies. When he'd tried to envision Sirena's return—when he'd finally acknowledged that Ray's crazy quest might actually succeed—his imagination choreographed a Busby Berkeley arrival with rolling tympani and blaring trumpets and swirling lights as a camera zoomed up the tiered catwalk to a gleaming white goddess.

But instead of a rousing soundtrack there were the muffled sounds of a marital spat through the thin wall separating their tacky motel room from the next one. Instead of brilliant multi-colored spotlights, there was murky light from a table lamp. And instead of a towering Art Deco icon—well, she was sure smaller than he'd imagined. The sculptor had posed her in a seated pose, but even standing Sirena would barely reach four feet. A bit on the short side for a goddess. Also a bit on the dingy side—more gray than white, with rusty streaks and stains and dents. Yes, this was their goddess—but she was in her morning-after condition, sans makeup.

He reached out to touch her bare shoulder. It was cold and hard.

“One rule,” Ray said. “We got to make sure it's unforgettable.”

“What's unforgettable?” Billy asked.

“Her return to the college. We've got to make her entrance an event they will always remember.” Ray paused as he looked at each of them. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Gordie said.

Ray slapped Lou on the back. “I told you this'd be awesome, didn't I?”

Lou nodded.

Ray turned to Billy. “Give me five, Bronco.”

Actually
, Lou thought to himself as he studied her,
the rusty streaks aren't so bad
.
Gives her character
. He smiled. All things considered, she didn't look so bad for a hundred-year-old gal who'd spent the last thirty-five years wrapped in burlap inside a metal box.